ArticleScientific reports2016
Cognitive differences between orang-utan species: a test of the cultural intelligence hypothesis.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- EVApeCognition: An 18-Year Dataset of Great Ape Cognition.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- Orangutan males make increased use of social learning opportunities, when resource availability is high.iScience · 2024Article
- Evidence for a selective link between cooperation and individual recognition.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- The method of exclusion (still) cannot identify specific mechanisms of cultural inheritance.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cofeeding tolerance in chimpanzees depends on group composition: a longitudinal study across four communities.iScience · 2021Article
- Animal cognition in an urbanised world.Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Short Tandem Repeats as a High-Resolution Marker for Capturing Recent Orangutan Population Evolution.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2021Article
- Chimpanzees' (PeerJ · 2020Article
- Early sociability fosters later exploratory tendency in wild immature orangutans.Science advances · 2020Article
- The reach of gene-culture coevolution in animals.Nature communications · 2019Review
- Interculturality and cultural intelligence in an academic context: A report from university staff interacting with nursing students.Journal of education and health promotion · 2019Article
- Genomes reveal marked differences in the adaptive evolution between orangutan species.Genome biology · 2018Article
- Cognitive performance is linked to group size and affects fitness in Australian magpies.Nature · 2018Article
- The effects of sociability on exploratory tendency and innovation repertoires in wild Sumatran and Bornean orangutans.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- A second inheritance system: the extension of biology through culture.Interface focus · 2017Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural species can - or even prefer to - learn their skills from conspecifics. According to the cultural intelligence hypothesis, selection on underlying mechanisms not only improves this social learning ability but also the asocial (individual) learning ability. Thus, species with systematically richer opportunities to socially acquire knowledge and skills should over time evolve to become more intelligent. We experimentally compared the problem-solving ability of Sumatran orang-utans (Pongo abelii), which are sociable in the wild, with that of the closely related, but more solitary Bornean orang-utans (P. pygmaeus), under the homogeneous environmental conditions provided by zoos. Our results revealed that Sumatrans showed superior innate problem-solving skills to Borneans, and also showed greater inhibition and a more cautious and less rough exploration style. This pattern is consistent with the cultural intelligence hypothesis, which predicts that the more sociable of two sister species experienced stronger selection on cognitive mechanisms underlying learning.
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